Bernie just equated working voters with white voters, again.

[gollygee]

13. Here's a good article about this but about Trump and not Sanders

The specifics aren't relevant but the underlying issue - that "working class" is about 40% people of color - is the same.

I should probably add, since everyone here knows that I'm a Bernie voter, that I think this is a product of Bernie's age and where he lives. I don't think there's any intent to equate working class with white. I absolutely recognize that this is a weak spot for him. He needed more people of color among his advisors, and if he'd included them and listened to them in his campaign, things might be different right now.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/05/what_pundits_keep_getting_wrong_about_donald_trump_and_the_working_class.html

The truth is that it’s inaccurate to talk about Trump’s “working-class appeal.” What Trump has, instead, is a message tailored to a conservative portion of white workers. These voters aren’t the struggling whites of Appalachia or the old Rust Belt, in part because those workers don’t vote, and there’s no evidence Trump has turned them out. Instead, Trump is winning those whites with middle-class incomes. Given his strength in unionized areas like the Northeast, some are blue collar and culturally working class. But many others are not. Many others are what we would simply call Republicans.

Even if Trump had a broad working-class message, it’s important to remember that people engage politics in different ways through different identities. A working-class black woman doesn’t have to be sympathetic to unauthorized immigrants to see threat in Trump’s rhetoric against outsiders; a working-class Hispanic man doesn’t have to hold politically correct attitudes about Muslim Americans to fear a candidate who promises a ban on a whole category of people. Given their high religiosity, black voters at one point were supposed to turn against Democrats on same-sex marriage. But the issue wasn’t salient for their politics—or at least, not salient in a contest between Republicans and Democrats. They remained in the fold.

Sullivan is right that the times call for vigilance. Against an unprecedented figure like Trump, complacency is dangerous. But we should also have clear eyes. Insofar that he represents any of it, Trump just speaks for a portion of working America, and the same divisions of race and religion that make broad working-class movements rare also limit the ability of a Trump figure to succeed. Why pundits can’t see this—why so many consistently miss the degree to which America is browner and blacker than it’s ever been—might have something to do with who they are. America’s commentary class is largely white. America’s voters, increasingly, are not.